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At the edge of the outside world

A look into contemporary music in French-speaking Switzerland

Marc Haas

Contemporary music in French-speaking Switzerland is an effervescent crucible. Through its diverse expressions it puts the whole of musical practice to the trial: in a continuous gesture of dissolution, it delocalizes and delocalizes itself through the questioning of composition, the musician, concert hall and spectator’s status, all the way up to the relationship it has with sound itself, aiming for, and using, other art forms and media than sound waves. If an exhaustive list of contemporary musical practices insid the Swiss-French-speaking sphere would be unfeasible, it is because such a list would require a close and definable set where to draw categories. But it is an open and permanently changing that reveals the examination, itself ever incomplete, of this landscape, that refers to a horizon line on which the said music would reveal its consistency in a perpetual state of becoming. It will be here about giving a few concrete example of the way in which this delocalization is carried out: from the neighbourhood collective to the punctual intervention in indefinite places, from improvisation to immanent creation through excentred dispositifs, it is here an infinite scale that is at play towards the cosmos.